A Changing of the Guard

I bought a new car. It's a 2005 Toyota Corolla Le. It's a 1.8 liter 4 cylinder automatic. It was a really long process to buy it.

I started shopping. One of the main issues were headroom, in most vehicles and I learned that sunroofs were bad because you lose a couple inches of valuable headroom. Next once I found something I fit in most were eliminated due to issues I found through research.

This eliminated most used vehicles. At this point I was couple months into my search and I wanted to give up and just keep the Vic and I figured it would be about $2000 in parts to fix everything and buy and install a new seat. So I asked my dad what he would want for it and he said $3000. Which would mean that to do the Vic I would be buying it and getting the needed parts for $5000 plus a LOT of hours of labor on it. At this point I decided it wasn't an option.

So I found a little black corolla on craigslist without a lot of information in the post. I knew it was black, I couldn’t tell what interior color it had, I knew that it had 120,000 miles and that it was listed for $4000. Which meant that I could buy it without a loan and instead use only the money I had saved. So I contacted the owner and set up a time to look at it on Friday. No one was willing to go with me but eventually I got my dad to go. I wasn’t wild about this because he didn’t think it was a good idea to buy a car but it was better than nothing. I looked at the car at 7 at night so it was dark. It was about 20 minutes from my house and my initial impression was concern as the car looked a little rough, it hadn’t been washed in a while and it was pretty dirty. Then I met the woman and her husband. It was her car and with used cars who you're buying from is often more important than the actual make and model because reliability often depends on the owner. They were a young married couple I’m guessing mid to late twenties and she was a nurse in good shape and probably about 5’5”. Which was stellar for me because it meant two things; as a smaller woman the seat would probably be in excellent shape and as a nurse it would most likely be clean and probably have regular maintenance done.

I learned that she was the original owner and that it was given to her in high school and that she had used it through nursing school and had recently been rotated to Michigan. She and the car were from Montana. So I took it for a test drive and it felt pretty good but they only wanted me to go around the block. I stopped at a gas station to look at it under the light and found a few dents and scratches and a panel that wasn’t fitting into place properly. Finally I got on the ground to look at it from the bottom and was surprised to find almost no rust underneath the car. We took it back and agreed to have me look at it again on Sunday when they got back into town so that I could see it in the daylight and take it on the freeway.

I returned on Sunday with $4000 in my pocket and liked the test drive and learned about an accident it had been in. It was minor and was in a parking lot and was the reason the passenger front fender didn’t fit perfectly anymore. I looked at the frame and components in that area and was satisfied that there wasn’t major structural damage and negotiated down to $3700 including a set of winter tires and wheels. I had bought my first car.